DEVELOPING ALTERNATIVES
Land and Climate: Lessons from Ethiopia
Climate change is leading to higher average temperatures and greater rainfall variability, with a pronounced effect on agricultural productivity and the suitability of major crops in Ethiopia. Farming households with tenure security are more likely to choose to access credit and to invest in their land by planting trees and longer-term crops, and by reducing soil erosion—for example, via terracing. Such investments can help farmers mitigate risks related to heavy precipitation, such as soil run-off or crop failure. In addition to sequestering carbon, trees, through shade and moisture retention, help to increase land resilience to heat stress.
Natural Capital: Exploring a Financial Method to Evaluate its Cost
Large capital projects are evaluated using the “weighted average cost of capital,” or WACC. Traditionally, WACC is composed of two elements: the cost of debt and the cost of equity. The Dasgupta review on The Economics of Biodiversity, along with the growing consensus in capital markets and financial regulation to account for all risks, makes clear that a new term needs to be added: the cost of nature.
Malawi’s Land Governance is Headed in the Right Direction
Malawi’s population is primarily rural, with most of the agricultural sector comprising farmers cultivating small, rain-fed plots intended to grow food for their own consumption. With a rapidly increasing population, the pressure on Malawi’s land and natural resources is high, particularly for smallholder farmers.
This Time It’s Different: A New Measure of Competitiveness, Now Including Nature
This article is the first in a series that explores the relationship between competitiveness and sustainability through a new lens that seeks to account for the use and abuse of natural capital. In this series—titled The Nature of Competitiveness: a New Worldview for Corporate Sustainability—we endeavor to identify solutions such as new business models, asset valuation and price costing methodologies, and alternative supply chain structures that will help business leaders to conceive, plan, and execute a new vision of competitiveness.
In Ethiopia, Keeping Land Rights on the Agenda Through the Pandemic
During the COVID-19 health crisis, land might not appear to be an urgent issue. But it is becoming increasingly clear that the pandemic is more than a health emergency—it’s an economic and social emergency too, which threatens to worsen the economic outlook for many people who are already extremely vulnerable. We know those most at risk, in Ethiopia and worldwide, are those without equity—and by improving land rights for these people, we can help to empower them and reduce their risk.
What We Have Learned through Land Reform Implementation in Malawi
In 2016, the Government of Malawi enacted a Customary Land Act (CLA), enabling smallholder farmers to convert their customary land rights to private land rights with registered title. Crucially, the CLA gives land holders increased tenure security, which in turn is hoped to lead to increased investment in land improvements.
Ethiopia Case Study: Can the Land Titling Process Mitigate Land-Related Violence Against Women and Vulnerable Groups?
International development programmes can have far-reaching consequences, often into sectors or circumstances not immediately obvious or relevant to the programme itself. These knock-on effects can be especially fraught in the case of land, which has important cultural, economic, and social meaning to those who use it. When designing land registration programmes, it is critical to consider the broader impacts on society, on the household, and on individuals, and how unintended negative consequences can be anticipated and avoided.
Strengthening Women’s Control Over Land: Inheritance Reform in Tunisia
With a long record of progressive reforms stretching back to the Personal Status Code, adopted in 1957, one year after independence, Tunisia has a strong claim to be the most progressive Arab and perhaps even Muslim country in terms of women’s rights. Polygamy is illegal. There are strong laws against domestic violence. Tunisian women participate fully in the social, economic, and political life of their country. The 2014 constitution, adopted after the 2011 “Revolution of Dignity” that brought democracy to Tunisia and is seen as a compromise between progressive and Islamist views, holds that women and men have equal rights and that the state is the guarantor of this equality.
The Complexity of Building a Market for Certified Seeds: A Case Study from Mozambique
Innovations for Agribusiness (InovAgro) is the first market systems development project in Mozambique. Funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and active in 11 districts in three northern provinces, the project—a private sector-led agriculture growth initiative that partners with companies seeking to engage with smallholder farmers—has since evolved to include a successful intervention that assists farmers to save for the purchase of high-quality seeds and other agricultural inputs through community-based savings groups. This paper looks at the factors behind that success and the prognostics for the future.
Q&A: John Leckie on What’s Next for DAI’s Land Practice
John Leckie has almost 20 years of international project experience in Europe, Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, and South America. Recently named to lead DAI’s land tenure and property rights work, he sat down with Developing Alternatives to discuss DAI’s current and future land work.
Finding Meaning in the J2SR Metrics
How can national-level indicators be best used to inform the debate around a given country’s development challenges? It’s a question many of us are asking following the release of the Journey to Self-Reliance (J2SR) Primary Metrics—17 cross-country metrics that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has established to measure a country’s progress on economic growth, democratic governance, civil society capacity, and other aspects of development.
Nine Lessons Learned: The Not-So-Simple Task of Obtaining Land Rights
The promise of land rights in developing countries goes something like this: Once an individual has secured land and property rights, he or she is more empowered and more able to participate in the economic growth of his or her community. Add in the multiplier effect and voila—a developing country begins to move toward economic growth and stability.
LIFT: Ensuring Women and Vulnerable Groups Reap Full Benefits of Land Certification in Ethiopia
In rural Ethiopia, land represents dignity and identity. More concretely, holding a certified land title means better prospects for economic independence, stable income, and bargaining power. When it comes to receiving legal recognition as landholders, women and members of other vulnerable, systemically disenfranchised groups have the most to gain.
Beyond Boundaries: How Secure Land Tenure is Improving Lives in Rural Tanzania
After Monika Lalika’s husband passed away, her in-laws did not allow her to use the land he had left her and she used to worry that they would one day claim the property for themselves. For Martha Paulo Mwilongo, a land dispute with her neighbor kept her from selling or renting part of her 11 acres to pay her children’s school fees. Joti Kihongo wanted to expand his general store, but could not get a large enough loan because banks would not recognize his undocumented land as collateral.
Case Study: Overcoming Land Tenure Issues to Stimulate Investment in Mozambique
In Mozambique, the Innovation for Agribusiness project (InovAgro) uses a market systems approach to encourage investment by smallholder farmers in agricultural productivity, thereby boosting their incomes. But many of those smallholders find themselves increasingly at risk of losing their land to large investors who, with the backing of the government, are looking to start commercial farming operations encompassing thousands of hectares. This precarious state of affairs, which is in large part due to the government’s very limited formal recognition of smallholder land holdings, has made small farmers more and more reluctant to invest in their land.
Case Study: A Market Systems Approach to Deriving Value from Land Certificates in Ethiopia
Funded by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) project works to raise incomes for poor and vulnerable populations in Ethiopia and to enhance economic growth through second-level land certification and improved rural land administration.
Putting the Value in Land Titling
What is a land title worth? The prevailing assumption in development circles is that helping smallholders acquire formal title to the land they farm will help them integrate into formal economic channels, invest more in their property, and access loan financing. But in practice most land titling programs have focused on the process of delivering titles and left the assumption of economic benefits as exactly that—an assumption.
Land Titles in Ethiopia Open Doors to Finance and Investment
While still one of the poorest countries in the world, Ethiopia has made major advances in reducing poverty and increasing agricultural production in recent years. However, the pace of progress is constrained by inefficiencies in the rural land sector, including weak documentation and management of land rights.
LTA Program Shows Benefit of Truly Participatory Approach
The Feed the Future Land Tenure Assistance (LTA) activity—which has completed mapping of more than 36,000 land parcels in 26 villages with more than 27,000 Certificates of Customary Rights of Occupancy printed and registered—is a powerful example of how digital technology applied in a participatory process can enable rural people to strengthen their land rights.
Mozambique: Even a Progressive Land Law Needs Revision After a Generation of Experience
Mozambique is widely regarded as having a modern and progressive land tenure framework, following the enactment of the 1997 Land Law. However, in its implementation, the law has not always lived up to its promise. Twenty years of experience reveals a number of areas in which the legal framework would benefit from revision and better serve its primary aims of promoting productive land use while protecting legitimate customary and smallholder land rights.
Women’s Land Rights and the Problem of Polygamy: A Proposal in Ethiopia
Despite being illegal, polygamous marriage remains alive and well in Ethiopia, and that poses some obvious challenges when it comes to land rights. Statistics from 2011 reveal that 11 percent of married women in Ethiopia share a husband with one or two other wives. Polygamy affects women’s rights to property and income because it is unclear whose rights take precedence under the law when the husband becomes ill or passes away. Unfortunately, federal and regional land proclamations in Ethiopia don’t address the registration of polygamous families.
Making Land Rights Real
Land rights are largely taken for granted in the developed world. Yet for many people in developing nations, land rights have no reality. In the developed world, land rights are almost always recorded in secure registers, but this is not the case elsewhere. The World Bank estimates that only about 10 percent of rural land in Sub-Saharan Africa is formally registered, with the remainder undocumented and informally administered.
Using Mobile Technology for First Registration of Land: Lessons Learned in Tanzania
“In the 21st century,” as I write with my co-authors in the companion piece to this article, “land administration systems will nearly always be developed using digital systems. Assuming they are well designed, then they are more secure, more efficient, more transparent, and more accessible.”
From Land Tenure Regularisation to a Sustainable Land Register
The evidence is clear: property rights are essential foundations for poverty alleviation and economic development. In Africa, it is less clear as to what may be the most effective way of establishing and especially maintaining those rights, with formal and customary tenure systems both offering degrees of security but radically different development possibilities.
Dialogue and Development in Ghana’s Oil and Gas Region
In 2007, oil and gas was discovered off the coast of Ghana, leading to a boom in infrastructure projects and investment in the country’s Western Region, particularly in six coastal districts. Subsequently, large tracts of land have been taken over for the development of oil and gas infrastructure, businesses, pipelines, roads, and areas allocated for machinery repair. While this surge in activity has raised expectations for economic benefits among local communities, it has also spurred questions about resettlement and compensation, alternative livelihood and job opportunities, changes to land use, and food security.
Public-Private Partnerships for Land Administration: Can It Work in Cabo Verde?
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have a long history as effective mechanisms for delivering infrastructure projects and more recently as vehicles for service provision. The use of PPPs for land administration services is less common, though there are a few notable successes in developed economies. In a development context—where donor-funded titling or tenure regularization projects often face serious challenges of sustainability—a PPP approach could provide a model for completing reforms nationwide and sustaining the progress achieved on a given project. DAI, which recently implemented a land tenure regularization project on one of several islands that comprise Cabo Verde, is exploring the possibility of completing that nation’s cadaster via an innovative PPP.
Ethiopia Land Registration Ready for Lift Off: Now What?
Large-scale land registration programmes such as the U.K. for International Development (DFID)-funded Rwanda Land Tenure Regularisation Programme have demonstrated that it is possible to roll out land registration programmes quickly and cheaply, on a national scale. Now, a similar but even more ambitious U.K. initiative in Ethiopia—the Land Investment for Transformation Programme (LIFT)—is beginning to gain traction. Building on the lessons learned in Rwanda, LIFT is working to keep the momentum going, ensure the programme is financially sustainable, and begin to realize the development benefits of expanded land titling.
The Law of the Land: Recent Cases Show Legal Support for Local People
International efforts to secure the land and resource rights of local and indigenous peoples are increasingly finding a friend in the law. National and international law, policies, and jurisprudence are coming together with “soft” legal guidelines and principles to yield stronger standards related to indigenous land and resource rights. Landmark cases are creating precedent for local or indigenous people who have been displaced to reoccupy or retain property, which may lead to strong tenure security and autonomy.
Legitimate Land Tenure and Property Rights: Fostering Compliance and Development Outcomes
At the request of the U.K. Department for International Development, DAI recently undertook structured research into the following question: What policies and interventions or approaches have been successful in fostering compliance with legitimate land tenure rights and what impact have these strategies had on development outcomes? The research team was led by Geoffrey Payne and included James Mitchell, Luke Kozumbo, Clive English, and Richard Baldwin, using Rapid Evidence Assessment (REA), a methodology that uses a structured approach to identify relevant literature and then assess the robustness of the evidence presented.
Enhancing Women and Girls’ Land Rights in Rural Sierra Leone
Around 70 percent of Sierra Leoneans live in rural areas, the large majority of them depending on agriculture for their livelihoods. Issues of land ownership, tenure, and inheritance rights are therefore crucial to virtually every rural household. But these issues are bound up in a system of customary law that in turn reflects endemic gender discrimination. One of the most vexing problems facing women and girls, for example, is the dispossession of their land in the event that a husband dies without the customary marriage being formally registered. It’s a problem that has drawn the attention of the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID), and one where DFID’s Access to Security and Justice Programme (ASJP) made substantial headway.
Investing, Leasing Land, and Compensating Landowners: The Addax Bioenergy Experience in Sierra Leone
Much has been written about the impacts of long-term land-based investments on local land rights, development, and livelihood opportunities—and much of the commentary, driven by notable controversies, has been hostile to the land investor. But while investors now have a plethora of guidelines and principles to follow in implementing their projects, they still confront a dearth of hard information and statistics based on actual experience.
Delivering Large-Scale Land Certification Programmes: Lessons from Rwanda
The challenge was steep but straightforward. Survey, collect, and clarify information for all land parcels in Rwanda—an estimated 7.9 million plots that eventually turned out to be millions more—and provide lease certificates to all rightful claimants. Never before attempted in Rwanda, yet alone accomplished, this feat had to be executed in line with Rwanda’s land law, completed in less than five years, and delivered “affordably.”
Big Data and Domestic Resource Mobilization: How Donors Can Help Developing Countries Increase Revenue
Domestic resource mobilization (DRM)1 is the capacity of a government to generate income through taxes, fees, levies, or other related resources. Increases in DRM are often achievable through the improvement of tax administration and taxpayer compliance. Increasing DRM enables developing countries to invest more of their own resources in high-priority services such as health and education, thereby reducing their dependence on donor funding for key programs. In addition, improved DRM has the potential to help countries promote good governance, strengthen domestic accountability, achieve more sustainable and inclusive growth, and reduce poverty.
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Donors and international institutions use DRM interchangeably for either domestic resource mobilization or domestic revenue mobilization. ↩
Self-Examining Practitioners: A Guide to the Journal
Resilience is the capacity to adapt successfully in the face of stress, threats, or disaster. Among the earliest efforts to incorporate resilience in a theory of social change is a model debated in the 1970s and operationalized in the 1990s: positive deviance. Jerry and Monique Sternin developed this concept to explain why, in a Vietnamese village with high rates of malnutrition, some children thrived.
The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.
- Japanese proverb
Financial Services Via Mobile Phone
Poor households, smallholder farmers, and small and medium-sized enterprises require a range of financial services to stabilize income, plan for the future, respond to shocks, and invest in their households, communities, and businesses. For example, savings allow households to smooth income when an unexpected cost hits home. Insurance provides a safety mechanism to cover losses after a severe weather incident, death, or other trauma. Credit supports re-investment after a disaster or steadies seasonal cash crunches. Financial services are, in short, critical to individual, household, and community resiliency.
Getting the Message Out in Times of Discord
A mobile phone can be used to destabilize communities by spreading fear and misinformation — or it can be a force for good, used to quell rumors and discourage fear mongering. It can be used to organize arms distribution or to inform peace actors. In short, technology is neutral; it is the content and credibility of the information shared over the mobile channel that determines its effect. DAI is looking at new models to support community resilience—the ability of communities to recover, persist, and thrive in the face of conflict, to borrow Andrew Zolli’s and Ann Marie Healy’s formulation of the concept—and we have found that strategic messaging via mobile devices can be of great benefit to peace advocates seeking to promote stability1.
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Zolli, Andrew, and Ann Marie Healy. 2012. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. New York: Simon & Schuster. ↩
Nutrition, Agriculture, and Resilience
The critical “1,000 days” window for child development, spanning gestation to the second birthday, is a key period for building nutritional resilience. Investments in establishing child health and good nutrition in this period pay lifelong dividends. In this period, children’s still-developing immune systems make them highly vulnerable to disease. Their high and very specific nutrient needs and the limited quantity they can eat at any single meal place them at risk of poor growth outcomes. Research shows that nutrition deficits suffered during this period lead to lifetime lags in growth and development, even if health and food intake subsequently improve.
Improving Resilience of the HIV Affected
Resilience has been defined as the ability to mitigate, adapt, absorb, and recover from hazards, shocks, and stresses in a manner that reduces chronic vulnerabilities. Vulnerability is a good starting point for any analysis of resilience; understanding chronic vulnerability can inform development programming to enhance resilience in various areas, whether in health, economic growth, climate change, or HIV mitigation.
Customary Land Tenure
There is good reason to believe that customary tenure arrangements are conducive to community and household resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa. Without landed property of any kind, poor communities and households are less able to absorb shocks associated with loss of livelihood in the formal and informal wage economies through which rural households augment their modest farming incomes. Communal area homesteads are a means for investing in housing and livestock assets that constitute important forms of savings, particularly in times of financial and environmental stress. The ability to accumulate these and other assets, and to transfer them intergenerationally, would be diminished for many poor families if land could only be secured through purchase.
The Climate-Resilient City
Using public-private partnerships (PPPs) to develop infrastructure that will enhance urban resilience to climate change is a promising option for countries affected by increasingly intense droughts, severe floods, and other environmental factors. Countries such as Mozambique and Vietnam are now piloting aspects of this approach, but we must address various weaknesses in it if we are to come up with a “climate-smart PPP” program.
Women’s Inclusion and Empowerment
Just as it is clear that resilience programming will benefit from a “whole-of-development” approach that ties together complementary technical sectors and different phases of assistance—from emergency relief to long-term capacity building—so it is clear from our experience that a “whole-of-community” approach is critical to resilience. Put simply, any resilience program that does not give due consideration to the role of women will not achieve its full potential and runs the risk of failure.t But we would do well to remind ourselves of the fundamental preconditions that must be in place for women to play their essential role: legal equality, economic empowerment, participation in decision making, and educational opportunity.
Fragility, Resilience, and Libya Two Years After Revolution
Given widespread regime collapse in the Middle East, a financial crisis hangover affecting much of the international economy, the dislocating effects of global climate change, and other fundamentally destabilizing trends, one might argue that state fragility and failure—not resilience—ought to be the focus of the development community in 2013. Under these trying circumstances resilience can seem like a less-than-urgent extravagance, a concept for the salad days of politico-economic cycles when storms subside and hatches are un-battened.
How Peace Was Won in El Wak : Strengthening community resilience through peacebuilding initiatives
Strategic and targeted interventions aimed at incremental trust building can play an important role in strengthening a community’s ability to bounce back from violent conflict or systemic government collapse. One such example is found in the town of El Wak — a remarkably adaptive community that has transcended an age-old conflict between two rival clans. In 10 years, this community in the Gedo region of Southern Somalia has moved through three stages of conflict: periods of recurring, inter-clan violence; a period of growing stability as the parties negotiated power-sharing agreements leading to better governance; and the present, a hopeful prospect of hard-earned peace and sustainable stability.
Connecting Communities
In certain post-conflict environments, resilience can be a double-edged sword —two Sri Lankan communities show a way forward. In the Batticaloa district of eastern Sri Lanka, citizens on both sides of the decades-long conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese have endured unimaginable horrors: targeted killings, prolonged food shortages, life-altering displacement. The communities that survived these recurrent crises often did so by relying upon the tight bonds and solidarity of their ethnic groups. As a consequence, even as the fragile peace seems to be holding, many communities in the north and east of Sri Lanka still find themselves segregated along ethnic lines — mistrustful and afraid of their neighbors, unable to achieve the security that comes through true reconciliation. For them, resilience has come at the high price of social and economic isolation.
Resilience: Development Fad or Concept with Staying Power?
Resilience—the ability of individuals, households, communities, institutions, nations, or even value chains and ecosystems, to withstand crises, recover from them, and adapt so as to better withstand them—has become an increasingly important concept for the international development community. The focus of donors on resilience has led their main counterparts—local groups, governments in recipient countries, and international nongovernmental organizations and development firms—to integrate the concept into programming.
Building Disaster Response Capacity and Resilience in Fragile States
How do we revitalize critical public services when a national government is in the throes of crisis management or distracted by the protracted after-effects of conflict or natural disaster? Solving this conundrum is crucial to making the transition from humanitarian to development assistance. Restarting basic public services is also key to rekindling a state’s credibility with its citizens, and the first step on the path from fragile to stable governance. The case of Serbia, where DAI worked for seven years on a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program to build disaster response capacity, suggests that supporting state disaster management institutions can be a powerful engine of resilience in fragile states.
Pro-Poor Business Law and Regulatory Reform
Urbanization, globalization, and structural changes in the economies of many developing countries have contributed to the rapid growth of informal urban economies. In some Sub-Saharan countries, for example, up to 90 percent of nonagricultural employment is informal.
Building Economic Resilience Among the Poor
Like everyone else, poor people depend on markets. They depend on markets to sell what they produce and to purchase goods in time of need. They operate in labor and land markets — formal or informal — and are affected by government policies and regulations. They require a wide range of services. Many of the markets they participate in are highly dynamic, especially those linked to global markets. In such markets, technological changes and price fluctuations occur in ways that poor people cannot hope to influence.
Market Trends and Resilience
The resilience of producers in developing countries depends on their ability to adapt to constant change in domestic, regional, and international markets. Changes in end-markets—primarily driven by technological advances—changes in consumer demand, and changes in regulations greatly affect market growth patterns. These changes in turn influence the requirements that producers must meet to access markets and remain competitive. Keeping on top of these trends should be a key part of any economic strengthening initiative.
Afterword With Rick Barton
After we had put together the Resilience journal, we had the opportunity to sit down with Ambassador Rick Barton, Assistant Secretary of State for Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO). Ambassador Barton has worked on problems of fragility, vulnerability, and instability in some 30 countries, and he has done so in various sectors of the development community: as Co-Director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Deputy High Commissioner of the United Nations Refugee Agency, and founding director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives. He also taught for five years at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. Below, we present brief excerpts of a wide-ranging discussion in which Ambassador Barton shared some of his personal reflections on the notion of resilience.
The Macroeconomic Resilience of Nations
Macroeconomic resilience is a country’s ability to weather economic shocks. This article presents a practical tool—composed of a set of indicators and a means to visualize them—for measuring the macroeconomic resilience of nations. These indicators are based on the widely but loosely used term “fiscal space” and the innovative concept of “monetary space.” The tool helped the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) determine which countries needed additional assistance during the financial crisis in 2009, and it has been applied in countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Jordan, Moldova, and Vietnam.